So Happy Together

Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President at Coca-Cola in gives her views on social media:

Recently, my colleagues at Twitter asked if I would write a guest blog
post for their thought leader series. The exchange went something like
this:

Robin@Twitter: Hey Wendy, would you be open to writing a blog post for our site with Coke’s social media advice/tips?

Wendy@Coke: Sure, but you know we don’t profess social as the ‘be
all, end all.’ Are you brave enough to let me say Twitter’s great, but
not by itself?

And their answer is clear as my blog post sits here as evidence of
Twitter’s bravery and, in fact, complete alignment with our thinking at
Coca-Cola.

Don’t get me wrong, we think Twitter is great, and important, and useful
and, indeed, shaping the face of real-time dialog in a marketplace that
has completely embraced acquiring wisdom in 140-characters or less and
entertainment in six seconds or less.

Twitter is the zeitgeist of young adults.

But, so too is social gaming, and mobile apps, and YouTube’s content,
and broadcast live sports, and Snapchat, and FIFA cross-platform content
and live-streamed concerts, and Spotify playlists, and live
experiences, and brand co-creation opportunities, and...

You see, their zeitgeist is plural, not singular.

In the same way, they have room for Coca-Cola and many other favorite
beverages, young adults also have an endless thirst for
content, technology, platforms, communications, apps and more.

So today’s successful brands have to be adept at integrating their media
efforts. At Coca-Cola, we have a principle of ‘no dead ends’ in our
connections planning. Meaning, if we’re going to keep the attention and
engagement of teens and young adults we must link together our
connections points. At every juncture, we want people to be able to go
deeper into our content, engage further into our brand stories, easily
share and connect our content to others.

Within our connections approach, Twitter is our glue. Or a
spoke, connective tissue – whatever metaphor you want to use to mean
something that can connect potentially disparate things together and
make them better – that’s Twitter.

Study after study evidences social media’s role within an integrated
media plan. TV + Social = better than TV alone. It’s logical. We are all multiscreen content consumers. The TV’s on, the
Tablet’s on, the Mobile Phone’s always on. As brands we have to tell
one, share-worthy story that’s connected across screens, experiences and
conversations. What we see on TV tells the same story as what we see online and what we experience at a live event and so on.

If brands tell useful, interesting, important, share-worthy stories across their
media connections then social becomes the vehicle, the platform, that
enables that sharing and connectivity. Social = no dead ends.

And why do we value sharing so much? Reach.

As brands, the very core benefit of social occurs when we publish
interesting, useful, important, share-worthy content to our embedded
communities of followers and fans (our initial audience) and, if we do
our jobs well on the compelling nature of that content, our followers
and fans act as our salesforce and spread that content to an ultimate
audience far greater than we could reach alone.

And this leads back to my initial point on social not being an effective
standalone tool. When we’ve over-rotated on standalone social in the
past our programs have failed to effectively meet our goals. Young adults are fickle and their attention is, at best, fragmented. No
one medium can effectively engage this audience and create the impact
and results brands seek.

Social platforms, like Twitter, help connect and amplify our brand
messages within this highly fragmented, always-on reality. Said in 140
characters or less, Twitter isn’t a silver bullet but it makes
everything else we do better. And for Coca-Cola, where we can reach up
to 15k Tweets per day, that means more reach, more engagement, more
effectiveness, more impact, more Happiness, all created by integrating
our media connections together.